Latin America

Article

One of the most intriguing dimensions of the encounter between Old World and New is the testimony of those who lived in the intercultural, inter-ethnic setting of the first hundred years of contact. Much more scarce than European accounts of this experience are those of American natives. One such extraordinary testimony comes from the central and southern Andes of Peru after the tur

When Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana, he feared, he said, that his readers would take as fictional his accounts of ninety-three days of battle because they would seem like the tales in a novel of chivalry.(1) A participant in the Vazquez de Coronado expedition of 1540-1542, Pedro de Castaneda de Najera, expressed a similar concern.(